Man on a mission: Local doctor works in Vietnam

Dr. Roger Hamm began making medical mission trips to Vietnam to fulfill a promise he once made to God. “I told God if he could get a 46-year-old man through medical school and residency, I would do mission work,” said Hamm, a podiatrist who works at the Veterans Administration clinic in New Philadelphia.

Dr. Roger Hamm began making medical mission trips to Vietnam to fulfill a promise he once made to God.

“I told God if he could get a 46-year-old man through medical school and residency, I would do mission work,” said Hamm, a podiatrist who works at the Veterans Administration clinic in New Philadelphia. “After I finished, I went onto Google and did a search for missions. Up popped Vets with a Mission. I gave them a call, and the rest is history.”

He has traveled to southeast Asia four times since 2007 — three times to Vietnam and once to Cambodia.

On his latest trip to Vietnam — from May 28 to June 15 — he was part of a team consisting of three physicians and a third-year medical student. They saw 966 patients in seven days, provided three open heart surgeries, one spine surgery, two prosthetic eyes and two prosthetic limbs.

“It’s a very rewarding experience,” Hamm said.

Vets with a Mission, organized in 1988, is a nonprofit group formed by Vietnam veterans to do humanitarian work in Vietnam. It has established 25 rural health stations in the country, offers medical training programs and works with local doctors to help improve their level of education and skills in the medical profession.

Hamm explained the purpose of the medical missions.

“What we do is treat general medical issues,” he said. “We look for people who need life-changing intervention, such as heart surgery and prosthetic limbs.”

The organization pays for those services with donations.

Vietnam has a health care system, but the Vietnamese people have to pay for some services, such as open heart surgery, which can cost about $4,000. Hamm said that amount is equivalent to several years’ salary for most people in the country.

One clinic he has worked at is the Floyd Olsen Memorial Clinic, located about 40 miles west of Hue in the central part of the country. The clinic is named for Capt. Floyd Olsen, a helicopter pilot who was shot down in the area during the war. He remains missing in action.

The clinic opened in 1996, funded by donations from Olsen’s family and friends. Vets with a Mission rebuilt the clinic in 2011.

“I was told I operated on someone who operated the gun that shot him down,” Hamm said.

The first time he went to Vietnam, he encountered some difficulties. Before he left the United States, his passport got lost in the mail. So he left two days after the rest of the team, traveling by himself. He had a bag of donated medical supplies and medicines with him. When he got to Saigon, customs officials at the airport questioned him about the supplies. But an older Vietnamese official intervened, and Hamm got into the country.

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The visits have proved to be an educational experience. “Every trip, I have a patient I would never see in the U.S.,” Hamm said.

In 2011, his son Nathan, a medical resident at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center in Cleveland, went with him to Cambodia. “He got to treat a patient who was spit in the eye by a cobra,” Hamm said.

This year, Hamm treated a 7-year-old girl who had leprosy.

He has seen no bitterness from the people of Vietnam over the war. Nearly half of the people in the country were born after the war, so it’s just history to them, he said.

A resident of the Lima, Ohio, area, Hamm commutes back and forth to Tuscarawas County every week to work at the VA clinic here. He spends four days a week at New Philadelphia and one at a VA clinic in Canton.

Hamm served in the Air Force Reserve from 1974 to 1980.

He spent 20 years as a high school teacher and university professor before starting medical school in 1999. He graduated in 2003, becoming a doctor at age 53.

Hamm sees the trips as a way to pay tribute to the Vietnam veterans he treats.

“I have the honor of working every day with guys who were Vietnam veterans who were in-country during the war,” he said. “I do it to honor their service.”